iPads and iPhones and Apps - Oh My!

Thu, Jul. 15 2010

A very good longtime friend of mine, an Art Director for a big healthcare advertising agency, stopped by a few weeks ago with his shiny new iPad. I only had a few minutes with it, mostly playing a motion-sensing snowboarding game with my son, but I was left with a clear and distinct desire to own one as soon as possible.

It should be noted, that when I met this friend almost 20 years ago, he was the only person I knew who had a Mac.

A week later, I found myself on my patio drinking a nice bottle of Prisoner red with the same friend, when he voiced his surprise/shock/disappointment that I still didn't have my own iPad - especially since my business is rooted in technology and the web. He went on to tell me how his boss had just come back from some trade show and declared the iPad to be the future of computing.

I explained to him that Apple blindsided us, and our plans for Flash app development, when they pulled the rug out from Adobe with their new developer terms.

He was unimpressed.He went on to explain that app development is the place to be.And how he doesn't even miss Flash since he got his iPad.And how even the porn industry is embracing HTML5.

I explained to him that HTML5 is a nice thought and a good Flash alternative for video in some browsers, but it doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the mature interactive application authoring ability, not to mention penetration (while we're talking porn) that Flash provides.

Again, the HTML5 and Flash argument is really apples and oranges.

Well, how do they make games for apps then? He asked.

Well, Apple has their own developer environment for apps called Xcode and you can get up and running with some basic functionality pretty quickly, but if you want to do something fancier and more graphics driven, like a snowboarding game, you'll need to know Objective-C programming language and OpenGL for the graphics interface.

My friend stopped looking at me like I was some kind of caveman and we finished the bottle.

The conversation shifted to a new project he was working on with a hot, happening shop, and as he was talking them up, with iPhone in hand, he naturally made a move to call up their website to show me - but stopped himself.